The spiny waterflea may be coming to a lake near you.

Ooops! It’s already here. And kudos to the DNR, whose staff quickly installed instruction signs for boaters on public landings in hopes of keeping the invasive species from spreading any faster than it will on its own. Some incoming resort guests who put their boats in on Burnside Lake Saturday had just heard news about the invasive species and were puzzled to find no instructions there. By Monday, the signs were in place.

The responsive signage was a speedy feat, considering that the spiny waterfleas were identified by the DNR just a week earlier. But a quick response was essential.

While we may wish that someone could fix the infestation, there’s no known poison, bio-control or magic cure, according to Rick Rezanka, DNR invasive species specialist based in Grand Rapids. The best we can hope for is to slow its spread to other lakes by cleaning boats and gear before we move them to the next body of water.

Fishing folks may see gelatinous or cotton-batting-like clumps of the little zooplankton on their fishing lines in Burntside Lake. And curse them all you want, the spiny invaders can still foul the eyelets on your rod and keep you from landing that lunker northern.

That’s not the biggest threat by the microscopic marauders, though. Spiny waterfleas compete with small native fish to eat daphnia and other tiny animals that feed young fish in our lakes. They’ve been known to gobble the “good” zooplankton, suppressing its numbers and leaving the cupboard bare for native fish.

And do the native fish have a taste for spiny waterfleas? Not so much. The sharp, barbed spine is a turn off to smaller fish. While larger fish will eat the invasive species, they’d prefer to dine on something less like a bite of cactus. In a worst case scenario, the spiny-guy populations burgeon, smaller fish die off from lack of food, and larger fish, likewise, have less to eat. Research on the 20-year spiny waterflea infestation in Lake Superior may show the beginnings of a shift in the food web, but no conclusions have been drawn.

How do you identify the little pests? Get out your magnifying glass, because they look similar to our local water flea or daphnia. The invasive kind are crustaceans, related to the shrimp, lobster and crayfish. They range from one-quarter to five-eighth inches long, most of which is the sharp tail. In a mass they look like cotton batting or lumpy gelatin with hundreds of black eye spots.

They are busy reproducing now, and adult females can do it on their own when the water temperatures are just right. They pop out about 10 young fleas during their two-week life span and, with the help of males in the fall, produce eggs the size of a piece of sand that live through winter to hatch in the spring.

We will likely never experience the bugaboo one-world government warned of by conspiracy theorists, but we are already knee deep in one-world oceans, lakes and rivers. Spiny waterfleas, native to Asia and Europe, traveled to the Great Lakes in the bowels of ocean-going ships and were discharged with ballast water. They spread from Lake Ontario in 1982 to Lake Superior in 1987.

Boats and gear used in Lake Superior and other infected lakes like Mille Lacs and Rainy Lake presumably carried the pest to the Ely area. Burntside boaters now must be vigilant about not transporting the zooplankton in water from that lake to other bodies of water. The DNR requires us to drain livewells, bait containers and bilges of boats leaving Burntside. Fishing lines, downrigger cables and anchor ropes need to be cleaned. Boats and gear should be scrubbed and left to dry for at least 24 hours before being used in another lake. The ideal would be to wait five days before entering other waters.

How badly the spiny waterflea will affect the food web and fish populations of Burntside remains to be seen, according to Rezanka. Connected waters are at risk, as well. Burntside waters flow up Burntside River into Shagawa and from there into Fall Lake and the Boundary Waters.

Still, the quickest method of transport will be by our own boats and gear. An infected boat from Burntside can be in a lake on the other end of the state in four hours. Rezanka says, 99 percent of boaters will be careful, but the one percent who don’t care will speed up the spiny waterflea invasion of other lakes.

It’s going to be up to all of us to keep the invasive species from moving to yet another lake near you.